Unsworn Industries sent a massive delegation to Alnarp the other day. We lectured, workshopped and exhibited at the annual Movium conference, this year themed “Life in the City”. Some 200 people who work with “everything between the buildings” - from landscape architects to cemetary caretakers - attended.

Prototyping the city

Following prominent speaker like Martha Schwartz Erik and Magnus sharpened their powerpoint to the max and delivered a snappy presentation on prototype-oriented city development. The key message: by making potential futures more visible, audible, and tangible they are possible to discuss and evaluate, also for non-professionals. If we are seriously working towards a citizen-dialogue within city-planning we need new “prototyping” formats. The Parascope and its sibling projects is one experiment in searching for such formats.

Post-lunch panoramas

After a hearty lunch all participants were invited by Elisabet, Terje and Magnus to remain seated and get their hands dirty with pens, post-its and panoramas. The brief: turn the space outside the conference venue, “Bobos plats”, into a better meeting place. In one hour. The resulting panoramas were uploaded into a Parascope on-site for swift comparison. Thanks everyone for eagerly joining in!

Stainless steel showcases

Besides two Parascopes, we exhibited a fully functioning Megaphonebooth. Back from duty in Helsinki last summer the Megaphonebooth presents unexpected action spaces and new public communcation modes. It also proved a invaluable tool for the moderator to announce the upcoming lectures to espresso-busy, mingling conference-goers.

On 21 May 2009, the world’s first Desktop Olympic Games took place in Maribor, Slovenia. This premiere - carried out with due pomp and fanfare - was fuelled by the sweat from a 7-day, intensive, unsworn-academic interaction design workshop.

Contemporary Athletics

Desktop Olympics is an offshoot of the Olympic Summer and Winter Games. Just like the ancient Greeks turned their everyday objects and war tools (spears, discs) into props of olympic competition and play, Desktop Olympians reappropriate artefacts of our times for competitive and playful purposes. In Desktop Olympics, athletes compete with computer mice, qwerty keyboards and office computers in several, new disciplines, ranging from Notepad Fencing to Scroll Racing and Folder Wrestling.

Olympic Challenges

During an intense week in and around Maribor´s old water tower, Unsworn Academy and nine participating students, from various design disciplines, formed the Desktop Olympic Committe. The committee was presented with the dauting tasks of

1. designing and establishing the Desktop Olympic movement and its online presence.
2. inventing, refining and communicating the Desktop Olympic disciplines to local and global athletes and audiences.
3. designing, producing and hosting the Desktop Olympics: Maribor 2009 public competitions.

When the sweaty torch-bearer finally arrived it marked the beginning of the end of a week of hard work, sore keyboard-fingers and science friction:

It turned out to be a beautiful evening at Maribor´s main square:

Designing without producing new stuff

The word design, from latin’s designare, has a threefold etymology: (1) to give shape, (2) to decipher, (3) to assign meaning. Most people think of design in the first sense and connect it to the production and shape-giving of new things. Interaction design brings a fresh perspective that is often more about creating rules and framing situations than adding new stuff to the world.

In Desktop Olympics this is taken to an extreme. Desktop Olympic disciplines are new “computer games” or sports, created without writing a single line of code. We assigned new meaning to contemporary operating systems, by redefining them as stadiums and the applications and icons as athletic props. Similarly by plugging in several USB keyboards and mice into the same computer, we reapproptiate existing interface peripherals into olympic tools.

Design in the Desktop Olympic sense is about crafting invitations and action spaces. In this workshop different invitations worked on several levels: communicating the sports to potential online athletes as well as creating and inviting to the public event in the main square of Maribor.

Mutiny at the Heartwheel

A pivotal moment in the workshop was when the participants literally stormed the post-it wall, grabbed the pens and promptly removed Unsworn Academy from the room. So far the workshop activities had been following a strict schedule but the students felt it high time to take over the rudder.

Of course, this is an educator´s dream. But it also made us question the workshop disposition. Failures are excellent learning opportunities. Had we kept the students in too tight a leash?

The pedagogic dilemma is also connected to a organisational dilemma, as the workshop was part of a public festival. Open, educational processes with plenty of room for mistakes are good for the students, while safeguarding a spectacular final outcome is important for the festival organisers, who need something nice to show to their sponsors and the public.

Loose ends, language laxatives, lessons

• Interaction design is perhaps more an attitude of shameless throwing-yourself-into and tinkering with other disciplines rather than than a set of methods and materials.
• USB-exploitation rules!
• Never underestimate the enthusiasm and self-organising skills of a highly motivated posse of Bosnian, Slovenian, Serbian and Croatian design students!
• Too many roles? Next time we will avoid confusion by not hovering silently between our roles as organisers, helpers, tutors, team members, tech-support, mentors…
• Thanks to the communications team, the desktop olympic hype amassed quickly through photos, videos, friends/fans and tweets.
• Check the official Desktop Olympics site at www.desktopolympics.org for more info, and rules for all disciplines. Play at home with your competitive friends!
• Brian Eno once suggested that more design should be carried out by removing things than adding more. This is a promising topic for the next Unsworn Academy workshop.

Love and credits

Respect to the Magdalena Festival, the Brain Working workshop, the Maribor mayors office, and Rotovž restaurant for supporting the event. Hats off for Ivica and Sara for super-smooth organising. Big hugs to our Olympic heroes: Sarah, Mia, Damir, Klemen, Spela, Ana, Dora, Oleg, Mirko.

After doing a inspiring presentation of his extensive research into Scifi interface at dconstruct 09 together with Nathan Shedroff, our old friend Chris Noessel went to Sweden to visit, decompress and relax for some days before returning to San Francisco. How well did that plan turn out? Not so much. Always industrious Unsworn Academy soon created a Mini-Conference of their own and convinced Chris to do the premiere presentation. The Show’s on tomorrow at 6PM, Tuesday, September 8, 2009.

This is what’ll happen:

Make It So explores how science fiction and interface design relate to each other. The authors have developed a model that traces lines of influence between the two, and use this as a scaffold to investigate how the depiction of technologies evolve over time, how fictional interfaces influence those in the real world, and what lessons interface designers can learn through this process. This investigation of science fiction television shows and movies has yielded practical lessons that apply to online, social, mobile, and other media interfaces.

Welcome everybody for presentation, snacks, small beers and small talk at the Unsworn Industries Headquarters!